The CIA May Have Waterboarded More People Than Admitted

Demonstrator Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is held down during a simulation of waterboarding outside the Justice Department in Washington November 5, 2007.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's 500-plus-page executive summary, the CIA employed brutal torture methods ranging from waterboarding to rectal hydration on terrorism suspects.

The Daily Beast reports that a footnote within the executive summary describes a photograph of a waterboard device found at a detention site named 'COBALT' where, the 3 admitted waterboard methods were not carried out.

Waterboarding stimulates the sensation of drowning and reflex gagging when water is poured on a subjects' backwards tilted head. The water enters the body through the nose or mouth and begins to fill the subjects' lungs and trachea since their chest is kept higher than their head.

"It's a smothering feeling as well as a drowning feeling ... you can't think about anything else when you're breathing water," journalist Christoper Hitchens said in an interview with Vanity Fair after volunteering to be waterboarded.

According to the New York Times, some CIA interrogators tried to put a halt techniques like waterboarding on prisoners because they were so intense, but were quickly told by senior agency officials to continue the tactic.

A doctor said the waterboarding sessions on Mohammed were like a 'series of near drownings' and that he was in such poor health condition that it was important for agents to use saline as a fluid therapy for extreme dehydration.

Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding '2-4 times a day' after his first experience, with water poured over his face for at least 17 seconds. During one waterboarding session Zabaydah became 'completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.'

Bush stopped much of the program, which involved terrorism suspects being rendered to facilities where they were detained and interrogated, before he left office in 2009. President Barack Obama then banned so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" when he took office. Obama has acknowledged some of the tactics used as part of the program were torture.